"at 6s & 7s"

[Craig Clark]

Bill Millard sez

> All this cryptic numerology biz about the seventh Christmas and 
> the phrase "at sixes and sevens" reminds me of an odd discovery I 
> made long ago when writing an undergrad thesis on GR: there's a ratio 
> of exactly 6:7 between the page numbers in the original hardback 
> edition and those in the popular gold-colored paperback edition.  
> Both texts also start right in on p. 1, rather than p. 8 or 23 or 
> whatever, so the ratio remains constant straight through the book.  
> If a passage appears on p. 66 in the hardback, it'll be on p. 77 in 
> the paperback, p. 300 in the hardback corresponds to p. 350 in the 
> paperback, and on and on.  It makes for easy page-number conversions 
> if you're reading a critical article that refers to the edition other 
> than the one you're using.  (Don't know whether it applies to 
> any of the editions typeset since then.)
> 
> Don't know whether this is accident or design; to my 21-year-old
> stoned mind, prone to follow Forster's dictum "Only connect" and
> TRP's suggestion that paranoia is the realization that everything's
> connected, it looked like the latter.  Since certain rather loopy
> Christian sects think of the number six as worldly, lapsed, or evil
> (666 and all that), and of seven as magical or holy (seven days in a
> week, seven tones in a diatonic scale, etc.... and maybe you South
> Africans out there can add some info about that weird
> bible-thumper/cryptofascist group a few years ago that used a
> swastika-like icon made of three swirling sevens as its logo....), it 
> becomes plausible (at least to the paranoid reader) to read a hidden 
> message in the very pagination of these editions: The Elect, who 
> can afford hardbacks, are damned, but the poor Preterite, with their 
> dog-eared paperbacks, attain something we could call grace.
> 
> OK.  Make of this what you will.  I'm outta here -- Mondaugen and I 
> need to go out & interpret a few sunspots now.

On a less serious note, the Kenosha Kid reappears in my Picador 
paperback edition exactly 666 pages after the final "You never did 
the Kenosha Kid"...

On the suject of the nasty Neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging (Afrikaner 
Resistance Movement) use of 3 sevens, they always claim that any 
resemblance to the swastika is purely a coincidence - hardly a 
plausible claim, given a very strong thread of anti-Semitism in their 
pronouncements. The claim is that the number 7 represents divine 
perfection, which is something I recall reading in connection with 
TRP as well (7 being the square root of 49, as in _The Crying of Lot 
49_). Prior to their use of the 3 sevens, the AWB used a different 
banner: a four-pointed star overlaid with an A and a W. This actually 
looked a bit like a stylised UFO... The earliest version of the AWB's 
programme of principles explained that "the four pointed star was in 
opposition to the six pointed star of  'International political 
Zionism and its derivant, the five pointed star of communism which 
was representative of a satanically manifested striving of the 
Ant-Christ' " (translated by Arthur Kemp in _Victory or Violence: The 
story of the AWB_, published in Pretoria in 1990 by Forma Publishers. 
Kemp is sympathetic towards the right wing of the old Nationalist 
Party government, and was at one point held by the police for 
questioning in regard to the extreme rightist-led assassination of 
South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani in April 1993. His 
book in effect says that the Nationalist party couldn't be all bad 
since they were not as fanatical as the AWB).

The  AWB haven't been a significant political force since a series of 
internal scandals in the late 1980s, including rumours that a glamorous 
(and half-Jewish) society columnist with a leading national newspaper 
had been involved in a liaison with the AWB's leader, Eugene 
Terre'blanche. Rumour also has it that Terre'blanche has a severe 
drinking problem, which accounts for the fact that he once fell off 
his horse during an AWB parade ("What's got four legs and a prick 
that falls off?" "Eugene Terre'blanche's horse.") They tried to stop 
the 1994 elections with a few bomb blasts and have just been 
implicated in another series of bomb blasts over last Christmas and 
New Year, but I'd say, thankfully, that their days as major players 
in the SA political arena are well past. I was disturbed to hear, 
from an e-mail correspondent in the USA, that the AWB flag was flown 
at the Republican convention which ratified George Bush as candidate 
for the 1992 US presidential elections.



Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
 the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
 on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"